Most known techniques for Reed-Solomon encoding are based on polynomial division. The direct application of this method allows for calculation of check symbols based on the input of one data symbol at a time. With k symbols in a codeword, k clock cycles are needed to calculate n−k check symbols. By substitution, it may be possible to calculate the check symbols based on the input of a number of data symbols at once, but the feedback nature of such a calculation means that the critical path grows with each additional parallel input symbol, and the encoder operational frequency is decreased quickly.